Hosting Company Gone Bad

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Bad_Service

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I have / Had hosting with a company for 3 years. Recently they changed there server ( where they store my sites / files) Since then the performance of my domains etc went down.
Every day I had sites crashing and not being able to be seen on the internet.
Every day I had to ask them to sort it out. I even asked why and most of the time they would say,"we have fixed this problem, please try again "
Eventually the whole system crashed and they had to spend a few hour rebuilding the system manually.
They assured me before hand that they would back everything up so when they restored it I would have my sites back in tack.
With out a word from them they restored files from 4 months ago. I contacted then and they said they would have to pass it onto their Data Center.
I had to wait for 3 days till someone decided they would answer my ticket and said they didn't have a backup that was newer than that.
I accepted that and when they put it all back up I spend then next few days (long hours) rebuilding my sites to what I had...

Then more crashes and slowness of loading, parts I couldn't get into till they fixed it yet again.

Eventually I told then that I wanted to cancel with them and asked for a refund.

They said the would "credit" my account and put it towards the next invoice.

I don't want a credit towards my next invoice and there will be no more of me using SLHost as a hosting company.

I have since moved all my sites to a new hosting service.

I have copies of all the tickets I sent and all their replies.

I have searched the forums and I am not the only one this has happened too.
it appears that there are a lot of people now facing problems with this company.

in their terms of service (slhost dot com / legal dot html) they say they Slhost offers a 99.9% network uptime Service Level Agreement

No way was my system up 99% of the time..
If it wasnt for me checking every site often my sites could have been down for a lot longer.

What I am asking is do I have any legal comeback to get them to pay me my money back for un-used hosting ( 8 months worth), and not just give me a credit...

Thanks in advance
 
Sorry to hear your story about your host. It happens a great deal, unfortunately.

1) The uptime guarantee is usually a service level where you get a credit if the site is down for a certain period of time. Sometimes you need to ask for this. Perhaps you can get appropriate credits by checking the downtime if you have a service that pings your server and demanding credits. That is step one.

2) Regarding the unused hosting, what is your agreement? My thought is that there should be a provision you can easily cite as a material breach of contract and demand a pro-rated refund from them. But you need to say that you had "X hours of downtime representing Y% and this has gone on for an extended period of time."

Without the contract there isn't much I can comment upon the ability to do anything, just point you to the right direction.
 
Thanks for the reply

The only contract is this page here (slhost dot com / legal dot html)
take out the space and replace dot with .

Hope this helps because you sure are helping me.

Am I allowed to post in here what their replies are to my request?
 
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The legal terms are simple and don't say much. If your downtime was significant then you need to calculate it and write to them claiming that the significant downtime is a material breach of your agreement. It also says that payment in advance of each month. If you've terminated the agreement you should be able to get your prepaid months back. My guess is that they had a click through agreement for an annual agreement. The easiest way to manage this is, as I said, showing them that their breach was significant enough you had to move your service and you should probably do so asap otherwise what you're saying seems full of hot air. We've got a great host in case you're interested. :D Best of luck to you in pursuing this and hopefully you can work it out one way or another.
 
Thanks

I did as you suggested and all they will say is they have applied a 3 month credit to my account.
An account I keep asking them to terminate. They say that as I have paid for 12 months the account will stay open til then.

Do you think this is worth pursuing further. The refund is worth approx $250. ( not to mention lost revenue from a lost customer and from whole sites being lost and a backup that was restored from June)

if so how would I go about this.

If not then I appreciated your help.

Thanks very much
 
I would wait until they process the credit to your account (probably a few days) and then go after the rest if you think the breach was serious, e.g. downtime over over 10% that is also directly attributable to them. But that's just my opinion and I can't tell you what to do. Let me ask you this - does the "3 month credit" mean that you've got 12 months of service for 9 months worth of payment? If you think they can keep the service up until then, it may be worth a compromise. It's your call but at least we've gotten you 25% of a credit so far. :D
 
What they were going to do is give me 3 more months on top of the 12 ( 8 left) that I had paid in advance for.
So instead of me having to pay again next June, I wouldnt have to pay til October..

Thats the only Credit they were going to give me...

But due to their service being bad and the slowness of my sites loading and slowness accessing other areas, I had to find other hosting.

So they say if I terminate it then I wont get my money back, and if I just leave it I have a server that sits there til September next year...
 
What was the reason for the poor response times? A VPS set up properly should not be affected by other users although it is possible that you may have been taxing its limits. I remember having one that didn't have sufficient dedicated memory to run a great deal and ended up moving to a dedicated.
 
mmm just wrote all about it for you and when I posted i got

Your submission could not be processed because a security token was missing or mismatched.

If this occurred unexpectedly, please inform the administrator and describe the action you performed before you received this error.



So will try again in a few hours after some sleep
 
The error occurred because you probably lost your connect and then had it reconnected, e.g. WiFi, and you need to refresh the page so that the security of your "session" is "rejoined." Try that again before replying and making sure you've got a fresh page.
 
ok what happened was that SLHost changed servers.
I found out at the last moment because I asked about Reverse DNS.
So the migrated my server space to a new one.
After this I had constant daily crashes of my sites. They wouldn't load, cpanels wouldn't load, even my WHM wouldn't load.
So every day I have to sent in a ticket to ask them to restart something.
And when I did have access things were slow to load.
I even timed the cpanel to load. the worst was 3 and a half minutes.
When I asked why they said things like there was a load on my server and they had modified it
or

"We have checked your server now. Your server is working fine and domain are loading fine from our end. Please check again and let me know if you are facing any further issues."

Some questions even were not answered. I had to repeat them to get an answer. And even would take up to an hour or more to get a reply. and this was with a ticket marked as Critical.

This happened for 4 weeks before finally it crashed.
One morning I could not once again see my sites.
asking why I got this answer

"After further investigation, we found that there was a lot of corruption in the file system. We have to restore your VPS from a backup. Your VPS will be down until the restore is completed.
If you have anymore questions, please let us know."

"Some of the configuration files of your server is missing and the server is not running now. We have to rebuild the server to bring it back up and running. Rebuilding the server will cause all the data in it to be wiped out, but we shall take the backup before rebuilding. Please get back to us with the list of the domains hosted on your server since we are unable to get that info from the server now and let us know when we can proceed with the server rebuild. There would be a downtime of 3 to 6 hours time during the rebuild.

So I asked them repeatedly if they would backup my data. I was assured it would be.

6 hours later (04 Oct 2008 03:49 AM) they had rebuild my server and started to reload all files. I noticed that the files (sites) were from June.
3 hours after this (04 Oct 2008 06:25 AM) they said
"The copying is on progress and we cannot predict the exact time for this process. We will update you once it is complete. "

That's when I noticed that the files were old and from June.

I queried this and 2 hours later they said they are forwarding this to their DC (Data Center) and would update me further
that was 04 Oct 2008 08:54 AM.

Two days later (06 Oct 2008 08:12 AM) I finally got an answer.

"I sincerely apologize about the inconvenience and the fact that it was not communicated with you earlier what the issue was with your VPS. Friday afternoon we had noticed that the file system on your VPS had become corrupted and all files needed to be restored from backup. Unfortunately, the only backup we had on file for your VPS was from early June of 2008 which is why you are currently seeing older data on your sites. If you have any local copies of your backups."

They worked with me to upload some backups I had..

In the mean time I had one of my customers complaining all the time she wanted her site up.

And from here in is when I had more problems.
Slow everything. I guess because it was manually installed. Also bits not installed that would / should have been installed in a normal VPS system. Only found out what was missing when I tried to do something.

Note. For the last two years I never had any problems with things failing or me taxing the service. It only since the migration of this server.
And in the end I had to move. it was getting beyond a joke with all the issues I was having...
 
I see the problem. Your best best is to contact them one final time and mention that you had to remove all of your clients from their server as a result of their material breach of contract. This isn't an instance where a 3 month credit will be enough to appease the client. At this point your remedies are slim but perhaps you can use leverage and spell it out of them, e.g. you're in the business and word gets around quickly when a hosting company won't do good for its clients when it makes egregious errors. They materially breached and you have a right to your money back. By not making you happy, you may wish to share the story in popular places and they'll lose far more money in new clients than they will by simply doing the right thing. And you can also file a complaint with the BBB and list that in your responses too. It's just cheaper than suing them and, unfortunately, there isn't always an economical remedy for breach of contract. I only take out annual contracts with people I know for this very reason - without incentivizing them to earn the money, they have little concern since the money is already in the bank.
 
ok thanks.

The will not answer any tickets from me about this problem any more.


What is the BBB and how do I get hold of them...


This is what the owner of the domain said in his email to me ( as I sent a request to him)

We have already applied a 3 month credit to your
account.
If you read our terms you would see the following.

All cancellation requests must be received via the ticket system by logging into your client area at https://secure.slhost.com .

You may also email billing@slhost.com for cancellation requests but we
may require further verification when doing so.

Cancellations must be made prior to the next billing cycle. Payments
made up to the point of cancellation cannot be refunded unless the
client is within the 30 day money back guarantee period.

Also the terms state that SLHost offers a 99.9% network
uptime. The network was never down.

Under the Service Level Agreement portion of the terms
it states."Slhost.com is not responsible for money lost due to downtime"

We have met all of our obligations to you and even applied a credit to your account.

In reviewing your account your account will be active until September 2009 unless we get a Cancellation request from you.

We are considering this matter closed.


Thank You.
Jeffrey D. Cagwin | MCSE
Senior Network Administrator | Datacenter Manager
LogicalSolutions.net ::::: internet://development.hosting.marketing


He is saying if I want to cancel the whole thing I must put it in a ticket through their ticket system.
They say their network was never down. but my server was down heaps.
 
Well thanks very much for your help.

Looks like they will not budge in any way

they dont even seem scared when I mention legal action..

Well I guess letting everyone know they are a bad host will do them more damage anyway..
and from what I see on the net, I am amongst many that have been given a raw deal...

So thanks for your help, I appreciate it
 
Sure, any time. I'm not surprised about their blowing you off regarding legal action. It's a few hundred dollars at most. They probably hear it all the time and you are the least of their worries - I'm sure others have much larger operations which they are more concerned about. Sorry to see it happen when it does. Fortunately you still have your data and the ability to extract your own measures of justice that will give you a small measure of satisfaction...
 
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